"Two months ago, the Brazilian Linux community gathered around BR-Linux invited Novell to answer 10 questions sent and selected by the users, about the company's stance on Linux, open source, licenses, document formats and other subjects." "Novell has been very consistent on this issue and we have publicly stated that we do not believe that Linux infringes on any Microsoft patents. That being said, our agreement with Microsoft takes the patent issue off the table for customers. We have simply made the patent issue a non-event as part of a customer buying decision."

For myself, I really enjoyed the interview and I think it should eloquently put a vital "stab" into all the FUD that has circulated for so long.

If you want to believe that, fair enough.

That they endorse OOXML couldn't be further from the truth. They are part of the ODF alliance, and as they stated their, use it as their default format everywhere.

Getting OOXML support into Open Office is a top priority for them, even though it's been proved that getting compatible OOXML as a format for people to use on a day-to-day basis is just not really achievable.

What they're not concentrating on is getting all those Microsoft Office documents converted to ODF, and using ODF as their defacto format that everything passes through. That is not helping the Linux desktop.